FROM

Leslie Hatfield, HuffingtonPost.comMay 2009

Whether or not Smithfield is "at fault" for H1N1, what is clear is that
their facilities have been impacting public and environmental health for
years. Here's hoping that the powers that be, once they've managed to
contain this virus, will turn their attention to that.

The virus formerly known as the swine flu (although the CDC continues to
say that indeed the H1N1 strain does, as initially reported, contain swine,
human and avian virus components) seems quite likely to have links to an
industrial hog operation in the La Gloria community where the outbreak was
believed to have started, although new information suggests that this strain
of the flu may actually have origins in the US as well as Asia. As could be
expected, Smithfield Foods, the world's largest pork processor and co-owner
of the La Gloria facility in question, came out early last weekend denying
culpability in the outbreak.

With test results at the La Gloria facility painfully slow to emerge, I
want to point out here that I'm not saying definitively that this flu is the
result of Smithfield's practices, but I do tend to follow the reasoning of
Tom Philpott of Grist, writing on the 28th:

The question now becomes: Did the outbreak that started in
February and killed three kids involve swine flu-or was the 4-year-old boy's
infection an isolated case? If not-if the La Gloria epidemic turns out to be
ground zero of the infection-could the swine-flu outbreak have originated
literally in the shadows of Granjas Carroll's hog confinements, and not have
some tie to intensive hog farming? That's a question that health authorities
have to vigorously pursue.

Today, Smithfield CEO Larry Pope sat down for an interview on CNBC to
counter the rumors.

POPE: Oh. You-- in fact, our-- our team that went down even this week,
they have not been allowed on the farm yet. Because they haven't-- they
haven't satisfied the quarantine period. So our own executives can't go on
the farm until they've satisfied a quarantine. But I tell people when you
visit our farms, I'm not concerned about you. I'm concerned about the pigs.
I'm concerned about you contaminating the pigs. Not the pigs contaminating
you.

BURNETT: And this is because pigs and humans, in terms of DN--
there--there's a lot of similarities.

POPE: There are.

BURNETT: That's the bottom line. So that's why diseases can go back
andforth.

POPE: People-- people can give it to them. They can give-- they can give
some to people on-- on occasion. But this doesn't appear to be that case at
all. It doesn't appear to be there at all. And again, it doesn't transmit
through the meat.

That nobody has been sickened by eating the meat is not at issue, though
one could imagine why such a question would be of great importance to the
head of the largest pork production company in the world. It is interesting
to note that nobody has said specifically that a person could not be
infected by handling raw pork from an animal that was infected. I think it's
also worth noting here what Pope doesn't come right out and say -- that
conditions at their facilities create such a tenuous situation for the
health of these animals that they have to take these precautions (which may
be preventing some of those quite-slow test results) when humans visit these
facilities.

Whether or not scientists pin this strain of influenza on Smithfield, the
fact that factory farms are a breeding ground for infectious diseases is
well documented. Hans-Gerhard Wagner, a senior officer with the U.N.'s Food
and Agriculture Organization, has called the "intensive industrial farming
of livestock" an "opportunity for emerging disease."

Not only that, but the ecological implications of industrial agriculture
are worth mentioning here as well. Interestingly enough, Jeff Tietz's 2006
Rolling Stone article, Boss Hog, is still among the best I've seen on the
subject.

In it, Tietz points out that a single Smithfield plant in Utah, housing a
half million animals, generates more fecal waste per year than the 1.5
million people in Manhattan. He goes on to point out that companies like
Smithfield are not required to treat said waste in the manner that local
governments are required to treat human waste and that:

The excrement of Smithfield hogs is hardly even pig sh*t:
On a continuum of pollutants, it is probably closer to radioactive waste
than to organic manure. The reason it is so toxic is Smithfield's
efficiency.

Smithfield's holding ponds -- the company calls them
lagoons -- cover as much as 120,000 square feet. The area around a single
slaughterhouse can contain hundreds of lagoons, some of which run thirty
feet deep. The liquid in them is not brown. The interactions between the
bacteria and blood and afterbirths and stillborn piglets and urine and
excrement and chemicals and drugs turn the lagoons pink.

Even light rains can cause lagoons to overflow; major
floods have transformed entire counties into pig-sh*t bayous. To alleviate
swelling lagoons, workers sometimes pump the sh*t out of them and spray the
waste on surrounding fields, which results in what the industry daintily
refers to as "overapplication." This can turn hundreds of acres -- thousands
of football fields -- into shallow mud puddles of pig sh*t. Tree branches
drip with pig sh*t.

Some pig-farm lagoons have polyethylene liners, which can
be punctured by rocks in the ground, allowing sh*t to seep beneath the
liners and spread and ferment. Gases from the fermentation can inflate the
liner like a hot-air balloon and rise in an expanding, accelerating bubble,
forcing thousands of tons of feces out of the lagoon in all directions.

All of this excrement has implications outside of the arena of public
health. Tietz goes on to quote the then-chairman of Smithfield, one Joseph
Luter III, as saying that the company had been charged by the Environmental
Protection Agency with "a very, very small percent" (seventy-four at the
time, compared to 2.5 million) of what he viewed as potential charges.

In 1997, the EPA hit Smithfield with the largest Clean Water Act fine to
date ($12.6 million) for dumping "illegal levels of pollutants from their
slaughterhouse into the Pagan River."

Also from Tietz, on the impact of all that waste in waterways:

Hog farms in North Carolina also emit some 300 tons of
nitrogen into the air every day as ammonia gas, much of which falls back to
earth and deprives lakes and streams of oxygen, stimulating algal blooms and
killing fish.

And on the company's pollution track record:

Smithfield is not just a virtuosic polluter; it is also a
theatrical one. Its lagoons are historically prone to failure. In North
Carolina alone they have spilled, in a span of four years, 2 million gallons
of shit into the Cape Fear River, 1.5 million gallons into its Persimmon
Branch, one million gallons into the Trent River and 200,000 gallons into
Turkey Creek. In Virginia, Smithfield was fined $12.6 million in 1997 for
6,900 violations of the Clean Water Act -- the third-largest civil penalty
ever levied under the act by the EPA. It amounted to .035 percent of
Smithfield's annual sales.

Whether or not Smithfield is "at fault" for H1N1, what is clear is that
their facilities have been impacting public and environmental health for
years. Here's hoping that the powers that be, once they've managed to
contain this virus, will turn their attention to that.

Fair Use Notice: This document, and others on our web site, may contain copyrighted
material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owners.
We believe that this not-for-profit, educational use on the Web constitutes a fair use
of the copyrighted material (as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law).
If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use,
you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.